When Jesus Doesn't Calm the Storm: A Photographic Diary

I wrote an essay for Christianity Today hoping to make sense of our experience of Hurricane Harvey. You can read it here. What I failed to mention there was the water that leaked out of the front windows of our house. There was the stress of watching the water seep out of the plaster in the wall--and the feeling of helplessness because there was nothing we could do to stop it until the rain stopped, which seemed like never.

There were tornado and flash flood warnings that the National Weather Service sent to our phones every thirty minutes, blaringly loud. There was the last-minute run to the local grocery store to buy an extra dozen eggs. There was the line that I stood in at the store which snaked to the very back of the store, with scores of neighbors buying up what remained on the shelves.

There was the eerie sight of cars floating down the street. There was the second time that I rode my mountain bike through the rain, a mile and a half down Plantation Drive, in order to determine whether we could in fact leave our neighborhood.

It's one thing to write about it. It's another thing to see it unfold hour to hour. That was the stressful part. And then there were all the other stressful parts.

I'm including here a photographic record of our experience. It doesn't come anywhere close, of course, to the disaster that many people in Houston experienced. But it's certainly an experience that our family won't ever forget--and would rather not experience again.